Resilience: often necessary, occasionally evil
Yesterday, straight from an energising discussion with our Projects team about future RSA approaches to public services issues, I rushed to deal with something more current and tangible. My twelve year daughter has a long term health condition, which means regular appointments and occasional bouts of hospitalisation. After twelve years navigating a Victorian monolith, we now have the airy complexity of a brand new PFI building. We’ve gone straight from Dickens to Huxley.
My daughter has always been intense and feisty – most people who spend a few hours with her need to come up for air at some point – but in her regular interactions with medical people and places, this is amplified. And adolescence is now adding to the mix. Yesterday, she refused to answer questions that weren’t using the correct medical terms on the piece of paper in front of the physiotherapist. She asked irritating questions, gave cryptic answers, and her body language was moody, sullen and horizontally sprawled – she looked like she was on our sofa watching something excruciatingly boring on TV.
Like any parent would, I often plead for her to be more polite to a group of people that definitely want her to be as well as possible. At the same time, I know that her assertive games are a form of resilience – a way of coping with loss, setbacks and change, and steeling herself for future battles and disappointments. She is an expert patient now, and her attitude in some ways ensures that the system treats her as such.
I remember Maria Balshaw, now Director of Manchester City Galleries, arguing that ‘arsiness’ was a key attribute of creativity, so should possibly be taught in schools. I doubt if this idea will catch on, but we do need to accept the need to develop qualities in our young people that aren’t always pleasant. Whether it’s the liberal perspective on social and emotional learning, or the more traditional approach through character education, both emphasise qualities and attitudes that, in essence, make children easier for us adults to deal with. Just be nice. Even our Opening Minds framework, which includes ‘coping with change’ as a key aspect of the ‘managing situations’ competency, might not be quite ready to develop and assess approaches which elicit and celebrate the nasty.
This links to an emerging idea for a broader RSA project: can we harness new insights into the teenage brain and other research to ask how can schools and society relish rather than fear the teenage years? What kinds of behaviour change do we need to promote, in both teenagers and the adults and institutions which deal with them, to ensure a happy, productive adolescence?
In pursuit of happiness
‘Happiness’ is a concept that I seem to be increasingly encountering. It is the subject of a piece of work that my colleagues in Arts and Society are involved with in collaboration with the Happy Museum Project, an initiative that is encouraging UK museums to support transition to well-being and sustainability in our society.
The Happy Museum Project was born from psychological research suggesting that happiness and well-being are not related to material wealth. On the contrary, an emphasis on material wealth has led to a focus on the short term, causing the majority to feel pressure to “keep up” and leading to more unhappiness. Key to a sustainable notion of well-being, according to the Happy Museum Project, is what they call ‘support learning for resilience’, which encourages learning that is curiosity driven, engaging, informal and fun and can build resilience, creativity and resourcefulness.
Of course this is not a wholly new concept. We’re becoming increasingly familiar with research that shows that over a certain comfort threshold, increased wealth doesn’t correlate with general satisfaction, take Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index, for example, which was developed in the 1970s. Now the UK government has started to focus on the notion of happiness, with the announcement of the National Wellbeing Project in 2010, which will see them attempt to measure how happy Britons are and use the results to shape government policy.
One area where happiness does not seem to have been a central consideration however is in education. Take the new Ofsted framework, which requires inspectors to place emphasis on behaviour, safety and teaching but makes no mention of emotional wellbeing, sociability and support. The aim here may have been to concentrate on the essentials and perhaps the more quantifiable elements, but this only reinforces the lack of regard with which these qualities are held.
Plans for performance related pay for teachers could be taken as another example of overlooking the importance of happiness. Not only is this measure likely to increase pressure on teachers, making them less happy, but their performance is likely to be measured solely on academic results, as it must be, and not well-being. This is not to say that the two will always be unrelated. For example it seems obvious that if a child is taught in a way that is exciting, fun, collaborative and supportive then they will not only be happier but will be more engaged and therefore attain better results. But this policy risks increasing pressure on students to achieve academically, leading to more teaching to the test and so risking children’s well-being.
Additionally some proponents of performance related pay for teachers base their arguments on economics; a good teacher = a good education (good grades) = a good job = more money. Not only in the current climate is this not necessarily the case, as there are not enough good jobs for high achieving students, but if money doesn’t make us happy then we shouldn’t be thinking only about education in these terms.
So I come back to the Happy Museum Project’s central tenet – our culture must focus on the long-term and sustainable benefits of its actions. Whilst achieving good academic results may lead to happiness in the short term, it can no longer guarantee a child’s future well-being in the face of unemployment, recessions and climate change, although perhaps it can help. My point is not to belittle academic achievement, but to emphasise that like so many things, we just cannot be sure. What we can be sure of is that having confidence, emotional stability and resilience, will help this generation of students to survive this uncertainty and to cope better, if not always be happy.
A Road Less Travelled
Last week has been one of those involving lots of travel. It happens occasionally for us staff that regardless of well made plans and diary management sometimes we need to be in 3 or 4 places in one week. This week started on Saturday in Blackburn and finished in Nottingham. To summarise:
Saturday means Blackburn at the Community Centre in Little Harwood helping the RSA Projects team deliver a community workshop on health and wellbeing research project for Blackburn Council. The aim of the session was to feed back to the community and disseminate the findings of research. With a community as diverse as Little Harwood the sessions shifted between in-depth individual conversations and wider group discussions. This demonstrated the value of tailoring methods to engage with your audience. For further information on this project contact Gaia Marcus
Workshop, Little Harwood
Tuesday a fleeting visit to North West and the latest planning meeting for the Keep Calm and Prepare for Change Conference planned for Manchester on 18 October 2012. This event will connect and combine new ways of doing business, examine how we can use resources wiseley and shift society perspectives around living sustainability. Co-ordinated by a groups of Fellows the event has already secured major support from the University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University, Business in the Community and the RSA. If you would like to get involved please contact Lilian Barton.
Wednesday leads to Yorkshire to talk through governance changes and preparing for Fellowship Council and Regional Chair elections. I also connected with York Fellows at the Ebor Lecture with David Halpern. The York Network is exploring a collaboration with Ebor and their many partners (including York St John University and Joseph Rowntree Foundation) to encourage debate and discussion with this programme currently focusing on “Big Society”. The next event will be on the 2 May in York Minster with Will Hutton. The York Network will be hosting a small get together to continue the discussion and debate.
Thursday finds me in Nottingham for a Network meeting on RSA SkillsBank, a project I am currently leading on. As well as general relaxed networking and connecting we also talked through the aims of SkillsBank, how Fellows can get involved and how we can swap into the expertise or knowledge to help their project. We also found time to play the Skills Game and demonstrated how everyone has something to contribute.
So a busy and productive week highlighting the many diverse activities of the Fellowship.
Vivs Long-Ferguson, Senior Networks Manager
Twitter @vivslf
Wellbeing in a world of Steppenwolves
Can drinking tea bring you back to your true self? According to Twinings’s new marketing campaign it can. Their latest adverts feature, in various wistful scenarios, someone making a perilous journey to meet what is ostensibly another version of themselves. As they eventually encounter their other half, whether on a beach or a mountain top, they entwine and become one.
Although a seemingly innocuous advert, it is rather telling about the way in which we perceive the route to wellbeing and harmony. It suggests that happiness and satisfaction can be realised by simply getting back to our old selves and our default setting. In this way, happiness does not come from accepting and acknowledging our misgivings and faults, but rather from being able to navigate two versions of ourselves and getting back to the truest, most virtuous one. Twinings new motto sums it up neatly: ‘Twinings gets you back to you’.
This brings to mind Herman Hesse’s existential novel, Steppenwolf. Set in the 1920s, it tells the story of an intellectual man of middle age who, becoming disillusioned with bourgeois society, racks his mind to find the source of his unhappiness. In the process he becomes even more disturbed and on numerous occasions plans to take his own life. Part way through the novel, the lead character, Harry, comes upon a small book entitled ‘Treatise on the Steppenwolf’, which appears to describe in exact terms the condition from which he is suffering.
The source of his angst, the book says, is his obsession with splitting himself in two (man and beast) and according blame to either ‘self’ depending on what best suits his circumstances. As Hesse writes, With the ‘man’ he packs in everything spiritual and sublimated or even cultivated to be found in himself, and with the wolf all that is instinctive, savage, and chaotic. What Harry does is clump different parts of his ‘soul’ in only two parts, Jekyll and Hyde-like, not realising that in fact his life oscillates, not between two poles, such as body and spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands, between innumerable poles.
This means of defining himself in such crude dualistic terms causes him immense damage. As he battles to pin down his ‘true’ self – whether that is man or wolf – while apprehending the other, he inevitably tears himself apart in the process. He fails to acknowledge that he does and should harbour not just two but thousands of selves, and instead searches sentimentally for some genuine, true, original entity that simply does not exist. Hesse writes that rather than attempting to simplify his soul, Harry’s true route to happiness and harmony is to at last take the whole world into your soul, cost what it may.
Having read through the whole of Steppenwolf and returned to certain passages at numerous points, I still feel as though I’ve yet to get a firm handle on what the notion of a ‘mulitutude of souls’ really means, why it’s significant, and, possibly most important of all, how to realise this state of being. I see some connections to mindfulness and Buddhist concepts of higher fulfilment – Hesse references Buddhism and Indian poetry at regular points in the text – but it all feels too ephemeral to grasp. And I’m sure you feel the same.
Nevertheless, the idea that we are endlessly pursuing a return to an original, innocent version of ourselves – and to treat that as our most virtuous best ‘half’ – is an experience I’m sure many of us can relate to. Indeed, all too often we appear to expend great efforts in returning to some ideal archetype, no doubt causing ourselves numerous headaches in the process. Not least because we feel incapable of reaching or sustaining these high aspirations.
So in short, as comfortable as it may be to picture ourselves as made up of two entities, it does us no good to restlessly pursue either. Better to see things through a kaleidoscope than through a crude dual lens of black and white. While one swallow obviously doesn’t make a summer, the Twinings advert, like a lot of other product marketing out there, suggests that we’ve got a while to go before our understanding of wellbeing and harmony gets beyond the binary.
What’s the best age to be?
I became 35 today, and have the cake and candles to prove it. It therefore felt particularly serendipitous to read the headline in the Guardian: Is 35 really the best age to be?
The claim is not particularly shocking, since 35 appears to offer a mixture of youth and experience. I don’t feel particularly ‘old’, but I am no longer able to call myself ‘young’ without feeling slightly self-conscious. I am not yet approaching middle age, if only because that category now seems to extend well into people’s sixties, and being ‘thirty-something’ does little to inform or inspire. I suppose I am half way to my biblical life expectancy of ‘three score year and ten’, but with fingers crossed for a cure for type-one diabetes and plenty of runs in the park, I hope to be post-biblical in my longevity.
The claim that 35 is the best age to be comes from the insurer Aviva (formerly Norwich Union). It looks like a pretext for talking about when is a good time to get insured or save, and to be honest, it does not appear to present a particularly compelling case:
“It asked more than 2,000 adults from across the age ranges what they thought the best age was to be, and the average came out as 35. While only those aged 45-54 picked that exact age, most groups chose somewhere in the 30s, except 18-24-year-olds who said 27 and those aged 65 and over who said 44.”
You don’t have to be a statistician to sense the limitations of such averaging from self-report measures, and you don’t have to have studied philosophy to wonder on what basis ‘best’ is being judged.
Moreover, previous self-report measures have also indicated that happiness throughout the lifespan is u-shaped, or as the BBC put it, smiled-shaped, and they have similar limitations, while pointing to the opposite result(!) i.e. that life in your thirties and forties is a low point in the life span. Moreover, a previous study by Relate suggests 35 is the age when your mid-life crisis has a good chance of kicking-off in earnest.
Now there’s a cheering thought…
Whatever you think of the empirical evidence(and it doesn’t impress me much) it feels like we are missing something much more fundamental. If you wait for a better life, or long for an age and lifestyle that has already passed, you are almost certain to be unhappy. It may be true that part of wellbeing consists of satisfaction about the past and hopefulness for the future, but the experience of happiness has to be savoured in the present.
The best age ‘to be’, surely, is whatever age you are now.
The Buddhist, the Benthamite and the Biographer
A year ago today(sigh) I was attending the launch of Action for Happiness! The movement has grown considerably in its first year, and I wish it well. Mark Williamson is the Director of Action for Happiness, which is affiliated to The Young Foundation, but the movement grew out of the vision and motivation of what Jules Evans aptly called The Three Wise Men.
The Buddhist:
Actually I am not sure Geoff Mulgan is really a Buddhist, at least not in the card-carrying sense, but it made a huge impression to learn that his weighty CV (now head of NESTA, but previously CEO of The Young Foundation, Director of Policy for the Blair government, author, Professor etc) is grounded(or so I like to think) by his experience of being a Buddhist monk in Sri-Lanka. I don’t know Geoff Mulgan personally, but it is hard not to be impressed by his track record.
A year ago, his idea of wellbeing seemed quite nuanced to me, and he recognised the importance of experiencing the full range of human emotion(not merely positive) for a life well-lived. I was particularly impressed by his comment that people working in government tend to dehumanise what really matters, for instance they talk of ‘social isolation’ but rarely of ‘lonliness’ and they speak of the importance of ‘social support’, but rarely of ‘friendship’ or ‘love’.
The Benthamite
I am pretty sure that Lord Layard is a Benthamite, although he may not accept the term, and has called himself a ‘democrat’, which might be a less pejorative way of saying the same thing. He has done a great deal of good to promote wellbeing, so I hesitate to express reservations, but whenever I have heard him speak, I found his idea of happiness to be a very conventional and rather uninspiring form of utilitarianism. This is too big a question to explore here, now, but I think enduring wellbeing is much more complex than mere hedonic satisfaction in its various guises.
And I would say he is Benthamite rather than merely utilitarian(his world view is radically different from, say, Peter Singer, who describes himself as a preference utilitarian) if only because in answer to a question posed by Jules Evans at the RSA event Happiness: New Lessons he made it clear that he doesn’t distinguish, as John Stuart Mill famously did, between higher and lower pleasures e.g. the pleasure of writing a poem is no greater than the pleasure of smoking a fag. For Layard, as long as you are not harming others, it really is just a question of ‘whatever makes you happy’, in which happiness is a self-evident experience, captured by self-report measures. It is hard not to respect such an eminent figure, who does so much for the social good, but I don’t find his vision of happiness rings true for me- somehow there is a lack of depth, and no ‘shadow’.
The Biographer
Anthony Seldon is Headmaster of Wellington College, and also a biographer of John Major and Tony Blair (an old friend of mine, Daniel Collings, played a significant role in producing some of this work). He is clearly hugely industrious, but I find he makes me uncomfortable, perhaps because he always seems rather sure of himself. When I heard him speak at last year’s event, I felt he sounded more like a headmaster than a biographer- his pitch was more about telling and admonishing and less about discovering or revealing. At the time I even had the unworthy thought: “You can take the happiness out of the headmaster, but you can’t take the headmaster out of the happiness” and I think that line would sound more positive with respect to being a biographer.
His idea of happiness appears richer than Layard’s, and more spiritually grounded, but still sounds too much to me like an idea that can be encapsulated in the right kind of information and directly taught, rather than something multi-faceted grounded in a range or experiences, relationships and balances. That said, he has been a trailblazer for wellbeing in schools, and walks the talk in his own school, so on balance I am sure his contribution is a very positive one.
Despite some minor reservations about the founders, I am glad to see that the Action for Happiness movement is alive and well. I hope this is the first of many genuinely happy birthdays.
Packing punches with poetry
My social science research training was great in terms of giving me the tools to understand more about how we get to know what there is to know. Philosophy of science can be tricky to get your head round at first, but once you get practical examples to illustrate principles, it’s pretty much logical and consistent.
My first degree, which was in English, was much harder, in that, to do well, one had to learn how to get a ‘feel’ for what writers were trying to express, as well as understanding the mechanics of it all. I had excellent tuition, and was both pushed and supported in learning how to get the most valuable all-round education from critical reading of literature.
Unthinking politicians might easily cast aside the close reading of poetry, regarding it as an unvocational and unnecessary discipline. In fact, such practices can bring far greater appreciation to the details of important aspects of life that the language of policy makes impenetrable.
Photo by Joseph Lindley
Here’s a little example. The Social Brain team has been involved in the development of a proposal about ‘Green Prescribing’. The idea of green prescribing is to bring people into contact with nature in order that their mental and physical health is enhanced. Our proposal builds a rationale for this by referencing evidence from a range of sources, but obviously none of them are literary (that would be weird, right?).
Well, it might be unconventional, but sometimes poetry hits the nail on the head in a way that lengthy strings of referenced prose just can’t. Here’s a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, written in 1927.
To a Tree
Oh, tree outside my window, we are kin,
For you ask nothing of a friend but this:
To lean against the window and peer in
And watch me move about! Sufficient bliss
For me, who stand behind its framework stout,
Full of my tiny tragedies and grotesque grieves,
To lean against the window and peer out,
Admiring infinites’mal leaves.
Bobby Baker – an artist at the RSA
If you have never come across Bobby Baker, I envy you. I envy you because you have ahead of you the delicious joy of discovering her work. She is one of the most widely acclaimed performance artists working today, and has a large and impressive back catalogue of work which, using the most fabulously inventive methods (plenty of cake), makes art out of the everyday.
And, there’s nothing as everyday as mental illness. In 2009, Bobby exhibited her ‘diary drawings’ at the Wellcome Collection. These pictures, drawn daily over a period of eleven years, depicted Bobby’s experiences of mental illness, in real time, as it was happening to her. Throughout this period, incidentally, Bobby continued to work prolifically, raise a family and continue to forge an impressive career.
Despite her international reputation, and long established success as an artist, Bobby herself had no idea how the drawings would be received or what the impact of going public with something so personal would be. Needless to say, they went down a storm, the Wellcome extended the length of the original exhibition, and it has since been touring, going to Portugal, Belgium and Holland.
The ways in which the exhibition and the book that came out of it have made an impact are wide reaching. The book won Mind Book of the Year in 2011. People recognised themselves and their own experiences in the images. Those with no experience of mental illness felt a glimmer of understanding as to what it might be like. Practitioners and academics in mental health took notice.
Since that exhibition, Bobby has been as busy as ever, her new piece about what it takes to cultivate mental wellness, Mad Gyms and Kitchens, receiving critical and audience approval.
So, when I put a call out to Fellows of the RSA to find out who has interest, experience or expertise relating to mental health and employment, Bobby Baker responded. As a long-time fan of her work, I was ever so slightly starstruck (and definitely not squealing with glee) to see her name in my inbox. As a keen, and in her words ‘patient’ Fellow, she’s been waiting for the right thing to get involved with, and luckily for me, the challenges I outlined sparked her interest.
Today I met with Bobby Baker to discuss her take on the issues around mental health and work. She has a unique perspective, rich with the insight and wisdom that comes from personal experience. Amongst other things, she told me about a new project she’s working on in which she’ll tell the story of the steps along her journey to get to the extraordinary position of influence and leadership she now occupies. It’s quite a story, and the unique way she has of expressing herself, whether in conversation, in her drawings, or in her performance, is bighearted and expansive. Fortunately for the RSA, she’s as generous with her time and ideas as she is in her artistic expression.
Wellbeing without art
Wellbeing has become a hot political issue. Now it’s going to be measured, so that the nation’s wellbeing can be tracked along with more traditional economic measures of how society is doing. The Office for National Statistics is in charge of working out how best to measure it, which is no mean feat.
A set of proposed domains has been put together by the ONS and as part of a consultation exercise we all have the opportunity to respond. Yesterday, I received two emails from former colleagues who are heavily involved in arts for wellbeing, drawing attention to the fact that the proposed domains make no mention of the arts or creativity. This is clearly a huge oversight, and leaves me slightly tempted to make dreadfully judgemental assumptions about the worldview of statisticians, but that would be short-sighted of me.
Personally, I’ve always known, in an intuitive, guttural way, that the arts matter. Art is the most important vehicle we have as a society to understand ourselves, our relationships with others and our place in the world. Moments of celebration, bewilderment or desperation often only really make sense and come to take on their full meaning because we can connect to an artistic expression of what’s happening in our lives. Art brings things to the surface that nothing else can, whether it’s being moved to tears by a perfectly played piano, feeling the real meaning of war by looking at a painting, or laughing with liberated abandon when we recognise our own foibles in another’s artistic utterance.
Certainly, art helps us through. But that’s not to say it’s just a luxury. In my view it is a necessity. We need art in order to pose questions and propose solutions to them, to challenge, protest and defend. At the peak of an impassioned chat about what’s wrong with the world, a good friend of mine once said to me that ‘the true test of everything is the arts’. In these times of multiple crises, we need the arts more than ever, to help us understand problems and come up with solutions. It’s not just about wellbeing, it’s about survival.
So, of course arts and creativity should be included in the ONS wellbeing domains. But, even assuming enough people say so in the consultation, we need to be clear that these new measures are only ever going to be capable of sketching the vaguest picture of where we are on the wellbeing spectrum.
I quite frequently get my knickers in a twist about the inherent problems of measuring things. If you ask people questions, they answer them, but there are lots of reasons why the answers often don’t really mean much: desirability bias (saying what you think you should say rather than what you really think), suggestivity (ask someone if something is dangerous and you’ve planted the seed that it might be) and reductiveness (with complex things like attitudes, or wellbeing, the answer is often ‘it depends’, which can’t be captured by the bipolar response scales favoured by statisticians).
One of the huge challenges facing the arts is the obsession our society has recently developed with having an evidence base for everything. You can only fund your interactive art workshop for, say, young people in care, if you can prove that it ‘works’, according to one arbitrarily defined ‘outcome measure’ or another. I passionately believe that we should take steps to ensure that the things we do with and for people are effective ways of doing what we’re trying to do, and in that sense I am a firm believer in evidence based practice. But, what constitutes good evidence is a crucial political question. In the case of what ‘counts’ as an indicator of wellbeing, the exclusion of the arts is one example of the injurious ways in which we can easily get it wrong.
The Haircut Index
Following from my previous post on the Grandparent index, an attempt to add some fresh perspective on the key indicators of wellbeing, I would now like to add another: The haircut index.
A key indicator of wellbeing, I believe, is the temporal gap between deciding you need/want a haircut and actually getting round to having one. The longer this gap, the less perceived control you have over your own circumstances, which is key predictor of wellbeing.
I’m having a haircut on Friday, and I feel well because of that fact- it is some sort of breakthrough after a month of putting it off due to perpetually imminent deadlines at home and work.
You might think this is a trivial matter of personal tidiness, but I suspect it goes much deeper. Haircuts are a modern ritual in which we suspend our role as productive agents, and surrender ourselves to the tender care of a skilled stranger – a kind of secular shaman – who treats us as much with their benign attention as their manual dexterity.
And if that doesn’t convince you, here is the ‘blind them with science’ bit from our new secular oracle, Wikipedia:
“Hair is a filamentous biomaterial, that grows from follicles found in the dermis. Found exclusively inmammals, hair is one of the defining characteristics of the mammalian class. The human body, apart from its glabrous skin, is covered in follicles which produce thick terminal and finevellus hair. Most common interest in hair is focused on hair growth, hair types and hair care, but hair is also an important biomaterial primarily composed of protein, notably keratin.”
So if that’s what hair is(I particularly like the ‘notably’) surely cutting it off must be some sort of symbolic act?
So I propose the ONS should ask people about their capacity to follow through on their desire to have a haircut as a proxy for their wellbeing, and I am beginning to wonder if we could establish a whole new wellbeing index based on similar factors.
Proximity of grandparents, capacity to achieve haircut…what next?
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